


The Snow Prince

by Nny



Series: 2019 Valentine's Requests [9]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Fairy Tale Elements, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 22:06:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17795612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: Bucky kinda wants to know how he skips to the part where someone says ‘and they lived happily ever after, the end.’





	The Snow Prince

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince. He was strong, and he was angry, and he tried real hard to be good, but it turned out he wasn’t quite good enough to be the hero of the tale, so he fell off a carriage and he died.

Ain’t much of a fairytale.

Bucky read a shirt, once. Waiting for the lights to change, so he had enough time to read the dense text, even with the unnecessary size changes that made it harder to follow.

 _Either you die a hero,_  it said,  _or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain._

Bucky blinked and thought -  _or both. Both, sometimes,_  and it caught in the back of his throat and made him laugh until he couldn’t breathe.

So try this again, maybe.

Once upon a time a handsome prince woke up from an enchanted sleep. And where he had once been good, and kind, and a little angry maybe but with a heart of gold - where he had been all those things he was now cold, and dark, and lost.

It ain’t the kinda thing that ought to happen to princes. That ain’t how you get to be a hero.

Maybe he’s telling it wrong.

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince. And he was brave, and mostly good, and definitely funny, but he still fell off a carriage and everyone in the kingdom thought he was dead. He got captured, though, by an evil witch in a forest, a witch who turned him into a tin soldier with a clockwork heart, and the witch made him -

made him -

Bucky kinda wants to know how he skips to the part where someone says ‘and they lived happily ever after, the end.’

*

Okay. So.

Once upon a time there were a couple of boys. They grew up together, and they were close as brothers, and one of them was blond and one of them dark, which was a good enough indication, in the tales they used to read, about which one of ‘em was gonna go bad.

And there was this - this mirror, say. Mirror-blue liquid that changed everything it touched, and magnified what it changed so good became great, and bad became worse. And someone tried to steal the mirror but instead they wound up breaking it, scattering it to the four winds, sending it into the mountains and the deserts and the deepest blue sea.

And shards of this mirror found their way into the dark-haired boy’s heart, and he became cold, and unfeeling, and only good for following orders, and uncaring when he did.

And yeah, there were some enchanted sleeps involved, and some fighting and some giants and some endings, happy or not; mostly, there was the power of human love melting the ice in his heart, and ain’t that just some Hans Christian Andersen shit?

*

It turned out to take a while, for the happily ever after.

Bucky moved into the little brownstone apartment that Steve insisted there was space in, and started collecting hoodies to hang in the closet, and battered sci-fi books to stow away on the shelves. He collected ways to deal with his nightmares, too, none of which ever did much good. He found that the days when he slept best were the days where he fought his hardest, where he wound up sprawled on his back, bruised and bleeding and tired right down to his bones, knowing - ‘cos he was followin’ a little guy from Brooklyn - that he was going down the right paths.

He figured hangin’ around this many heroes had to rub off on him eventually, so he actually found himself being the one to encourage Stevie to get in on the post-mission diner-dinners, the team training, the movie nights. He taught himself how to be human again from watching them carefully and mimicking what they did, and the first time he grabbed Clint like Steve sometimes grabbed Sam, knuckling the top of his head and mussing up his hair, he thought he felt his clockwork heart maybe skip a beat.

He thought it was a sign he was becoming a real boy; turned out maybe it was a sign of somethin’ a little more than that.

See, Steve was a hero 'cos he wasn’t the strongest, when he started. He wasn’t the strongest, but he worked the hardest, and even when it was tough he was deep down  _good_ , all the way down to his heart. Stevie was a blond-haired-blue-eyed fairytale prince, and he never needed the magic mirror to make himself into a hero.

And the more time Bucky spent in the tower, the more he noticed that -

It was like the inverse of the mirror. It was like the opposite of what it’d done. Like it’d taken the perfection of Steve and reflected it, until it had the hero he used to be. Not the strongest, 'cos he ain’t got powers, but maybe working the hardest, spending night after night after sleepless night firing arrows in the range. Maybe the best, deepest down, 'cos he’d been twisted and used and he’d come back stronger and better and determined to make things right.

Clint made Bucky’s heart beat all uneven, made him feel small and breakable and human in a way he’d never quite got back.

Power of human love, right?

It was a tentative feeling, a careful one that he was only just about learning how to live. He found himself smiling a little wider and living a little harder, finding ways to put his smile onto Clint’s face. He found himself wanting to touch, starting out tentative and small, and building into draping himself all over Clint on the couch, pressed into his side and feeling warm right down to his soul. And Clint seemed - disbelieving, at first, but then happy, and then happier, and then pressing their lips together wearing his happiest damn smile.

And Bucky was shooting for 'ever after’, but he’d stopped wanting the end.


End file.
